Ketchup

Catching up is hard to do.

First, to give a belated reply to Joyce, as written 5-5-10 on a subject which requires no little thought or care, I agree that God's unconditional love is most certainly the necessary precondition for our gift of faith; indeed it is the necessary prime mover to make all things that exist, even those things that go wild in the night. I was speaking only in relative terms about the smaller matter of men's attempts at unconditional love, which are truly ridiculous and without anything but poorly disguised self-love until we recognize and not abuse or misplace our "perfect gift from above." One of which- tho not the most important per Paul- is faith. All of these, at least for the regenerated soul, are, or do become, fruits of the Holy Spirit. They arrive in perfect condition but, as perfect tools for imperfect people, it is always possible to shoot holes in church people, largely to avoid the unavoidable Actual Person of Christ Jesus Himself.

No one needs to repeat the obvious which is that men see what they want to see in any given thing, and look the best gifts in the mouth or even further down (uh, at the end) in order to find the flaws they need in order that they need not take responsibility for the whole horse, which is frankly impossible and nothing but discouraging and much bigger than they are. To those who go to great lengths to avoid even carnal responsibility (e.g. the Gulf oil spill--probably Snowball's fault) how much more is there motive to look for that which gets rid of God? Of course only by the Spirit, after conviction, does one become aware of Grace, which really is incomprehensible on our level, by necessity of our small size and smaller vision. So McWorld and its victims mostly never become aware of grace because they have already signed out on sin..sin against God, that is, not against "The Man"--and so much competition to be "The Man" with the ability to arrest anybody on a whim, as in Kafka!

Having said that, and unaware of my even greater, and many lesser, limitations, I am reminded that there are dualisms galore in the Bible--but only because of our weaknesses and our inherent inclination to spiritual adulteries. See Galatians 5. So one cannot be too much in haste--or too little in haste--to eliminate these realities; Auden aside.

Unrelated, perhaps, would anyone care to comment on the following?

Linus cries out, blanket in hand, "There's no bigger burden that a great potential!!!"

Carole King sings out, "Everything I ever thought is confirmed as truth to me."

"When does the level of execution put the work into another level altogether, the equivalent of a new species?" Examples?